Knitting Into Beauty

I don't even remember now how I first learned about temperature blankets.  I was fiddling around online on New Year's Eve and somehow stumbled upon them.

The idea is to knit a blanket, one row per day for a whole year, with each row's color determined by the high temperature of that day.  Some people do low temp or temp at noon, but most seem to do high temp.

I was instantly enchanted with the idea, who knows why, and spent a delighted hour or so designing a temperature blanket project for myself and ordering ten colors of yarn, roughly tracking the spectrum from purple through violet, shades of blue, shades of green, yellow, and orange to red.

Then I had to wait, recording the daily high temperatures, until the yarn arrived and I could start knitting.  It did arrive, and I did knit.  Here is January in Dayton OH in my temperature blanket:

There were two big surprises. First surprise:  All that tweedy stuff!  I was expecting stripes of color, but for the first three quarters of the month I was changing colors almost every row, as the temperatures bounced around rather wildly.  Second surprise: All that green!  Green represents a daily high temp from 54 to 66 degrees.  In January. In Dayton OH.  I definitely did not expect all that green!

So I expected stripes of purple, lavender, and shades of blue, and I got a lot of tweed heavily flecked with green.

It was a very interesting experience, knitting this way.  I had set up certain parameters for the project--what colors for what temps, overall size--but I definitely felt that I was not in charge of the project.  The blanket has a mind of its own, and it made some of the creative decisions.

Take stitch pattern, for example.  I had thought to start out with a double moss stitch border, to prevent curling, then maybe switch to garter or stockinette with the moss stitch continuing only along the edges.  But as I began to knit the wildly fluctuating temperatures January brought, the blanket suggested, by showing me how interesting the resultant tweed looked, that maybe I should just stick with the moss stitch for the whole thing.  The blanket also pointed out that the moss stitch, unlike garter or stockinette, would show the color of each row equally on both of its sides.

So I took the blanket's suggestion and continued with the double moss stitch.  I thought I might go nuts constantly switching between knit two and purl two, but since I'm only doing a row a day (or a max of three rows or so when I have to skip a day or two of knitting) the knit two purl two hasn't been the problem I feared.

Here's a closeup that shows the tweed:

And here's one where you can sort of see the moss stitch texture, in the initial light blue stripe and the recent dark blue one:

Incidentally, I discovered that there is absolutely no consensus in the online knitting community about the definition of moss stitch and double moss stitch.  Some would call what I'm doing double moss stitch, but some would say that it's not, it's a very small two-stitch, two-row basketweave.  Whatever.  I like the image of moss, so I'm going to keep on thinking of it as double moss stitch.

A few reflections on how it has felt to be doing this project in this January of 2017:

I am not a fan of winter.  I dislike cold weather, and the bleak colors and gray skies that go with it here in Dayton.  I concede that falling snowflakes are pretty, but I dislike living with snow on the ground and intensely dislike ice.

But knitting this blanket has opened me to a different experience of this winter.  Without surrendering my dislike of cold and snow and ice, I am at the same time acknowledging and making visible the beauty of this winter season.  I have found myself resenting all that green ("You'll have your chance come spring! Back off!"), and wishing I could put in some more lavender and purple, even while, on another level, enjoying the aberrant mildness as I go out and about.

I have also found myself acutely aware of climate change and its very real dangers--another factor in resenting the green rows.

The blanket makes beauty out of all these complicated and somewhat contradictory experiences and reactions.

Coincidentally, our theology book group has just started John O'Donohue's book Beauty:

On p. 5 O'Donohue says, "Our times are driven by the inestimable energies of the mechanical mind; its achievements derive from its singular focus, linear direction, and force.  When it dominates, the habit of gentleness dies out. We become blind: nature is rifled, politics eschews vision and becomes the obsessive servant of economics, and religion opts for the mathematics of system and forgets its mystical force."

Knitting this blanket is an exercise in gentleness: waiting patiently for the next row-color to be revealed, waiting patiently for the pattern to emerge, not imposing my patterns and preferences but receiving and responding to what comes forth.  It's a more gentle way of knitting, an icon of a more gentle way of engaging with the world.

At the same time, it is active, not passive: my act of knitting makes visible, asserts.  Especially in this highly changeable January of 2017, when a sense of pattern could easily have been lost in all the fluctuations, my knitting asserts, "Here! This is our January!"

On p. 6 of his book, O'Donohue goes on to say, "Our struggle for reform needs to be tempered and balanced with a capacity for celebration.  When we lose sight of beauty our struggle  becomes tired and functional.  When we expect and engage the Beautiful....[t]he heart becomes rekindled and our lives brighten with unexpected courage."

In other words: Find the beauty in our experience, and we find both endurance and courage.

A powerful message, in that January that saw Trump's inauguration and the tumultuous first twelve days of his presidency.  Find beauty.  Find a way to assert it, to set it forth for others to see as well.  And you will in doing so find courage (cor, heart, hence heart-strength) and endurance.  This blanket project, unexpectedly, has been doing this for me, at least in a small way.  What's doing it for you?


ADDENDUM:
If you want to try your hand at a temperature blanket, here's the recipe I followed:

Lion Brand Vanna's Choice yarn (from Amazon) (worsted weight)

Size 10 circular needle with 47 inch cable

Cast on 200 stitches (will make a lap afghan approximately 50 x 60 ins)

(If you want to make a scarf instead, cast on 30 stitches--will make a scarf approximately 8 x 60 ins)

Continue with what some would call double moss stitch, some a tiny basket weave: k2 p2 across, next row continue in stockinette like pattern (knit the knits, purl the purls), third row purl the knits and knit the purls, fourth row knit the knits and purl the purls. So a 2-stitch, 2-row basket weave (every other row you reverse). 

Note: "knit the knits" = if the stitch facing you is coming up onto the needle through a smooth loop, knit it; "purl the purls" = if the stitch on the needle has a purl bump facing you just below it, purl it. 

Ten colors:
Below 0: purple
1-21: electric purple
21-32: periwinkle
33-43: sapphire
44-53: sky blue
54-66: Kelly green
67-77: fern
78-88: lemon
89-99: terra-cotta
Over 100: scarlet

You can check out either Amazon or the Lion Brand website under Vanna's Choice to pick your own colors if you want.

I'm going by the high temperature for the day; some use the low. When I'm home, I just watch my thermometer and record the high. If not home, this website will give it:
Weather Underground historic temperatures


I record the temp on the days of a small calendar, where I also note what color I need to do that row in and whether I need to reverse the pattern on that row (it's not that easy to read the stitches with all the color changes). Then I put a check mark in the calendar box when I have actually knitted the row, because sometimes it's a day or two before I get to it.

USE THE RUSSIAN JOIN!! Or you will go crazy with all those ends to weave in at the end. Also, the Russian join gives a clear, sharp break between colors. Tip: place a paper clip on the yarn right where it comes out of the last stitch on your row. Then rip back six stitches, and when you are making your loop in that yarn, insert your needle into the yarn right where your paper clip is. When you have finished making your join, re-knit the six stitches you ripped and then continue with your new row. This will ensure that the yarn color change happens right at the edge of the piece.
Russian Join Instructions

Some internet comments indicated that the 365 rows can make for a very long blanket, so I did not do any border, and in fact counted my long-tail cast-on row as the Jan 1 row. Likewise I plan to count my cast-off row as Dec 31. My 200 st width makes a comfortable lap afghan.

Variation: Using the Weather Underground website link above, you can reconstruct temperature data for any year you want (in the USA). So you could make blankets or scarves for a birth year, an anniversary year, a graduation year, or whatever other milestone year you want to commemorate. And you wouldn't have to start with January 1; you could do first year of life, starting on the birthday, or first year of marriage, starting on the wedding day, or whatever. But starting on January 1 does give your color scheme a certain rough symmetry, starting with cooler colors, going to warmer ones, then back to cooler.

Also note: your temperature range color chart needs to reflect your location. The one above was originally constructed for New York City, but I figured it would work just as well for Dayton OH. Our climate is not that different from New York. You need to figure out what your likely lowest and highest temps would be, then divide up the intervening degrees into chunks that allow for however many colors you want to use. The intervals above are roughly 10-12 degree chunks. If your climate range is narrower, you might want to use smaller chunks, say 5-7 degrees, to make your project more colorful.